I am most proud though to see Coté taking third place in US Analyst of The Year. Now that is a richly deserved award. Coté spent his first couple of years at RedMonk growing into the role, but now he is very clearly making it his own. His analysis is both opinionated and solid, and he does the best job in the company of documenting what he does for clients at the Internet at large. Coté has also led the charge on our new media offerings, RedMonkTV, moderated screencasts and so on. Lets see if we can make it number one for next year.

Congratulations are also due to David Mitchell from Ovum, who earned a stonking showing across the board, and Ray Wang from Forrester, who just pipped him to top slot as Analyst of the Year. I got third globally.

The poll size was pretty small-only 116 AR people took part- but is still hopefully representative. Independent firms did very well. See also Freeform Dynamics and MWD. Firms that share research for free over the Internet appear to have done well, which would seem to vindicate our open source analysis approach.

According to the blog post by the IIAR:

What came out clearly from the survey was that integrity, independence and market knowledge are the analyst qualities that are most highly valued by AR professionals. It demonstrates very positively how much the IT research industry has matured.

16 Responses

I tend to agree Dale, with some caution because of the poll size. What intrigues me is that there are certainly those that would argue the only metric worth measuring in AR is direct impact on purchasing/deals. Indeed some AR optimisation firms take that line. These results however indicate things may not be as simple as that.

Just a comment on the sample size: yes, it’s not huge but you should not over analyse this subjective opinions polls and also there are not that many AR pros around, so my gut feel (very unscientific indeed) tells me that the sample is representative from the Universe.

Even with only 116 people taking part – I know from analysing the survey data that there was clearly a set of people and firms who stood out far beyond everyone else with the number of votes cast for them.

I truly believe that AR has evolved to look beyond sales – firms that get it understand the value that analysts can give in terms of market intelligence, advice on messaging, developments, trends, media commentary etc etc

For what its worth if Forrester can produce AR reports based on smaller survey sizes, then surely this one can hold its head high.

Jonny, Not sure evolution is linear. Did not AR start as an outbound activity and doesn’t one of the evolution branch leads to more integration with sales? In periods of downturn, where would you feel it’s safer to align: sales or marketing/comms?

One must ask oneself, what is the IIAR? Why do they matter? And why should we care about their survey results any more than we care about the research of the firms that they track? Because a relative handful of people have an opinion based on experience with a small fraction of the total number of analyst firms being compared?

A case of the blind leading the blind. It’s not going to change the average Joe’s mind or decision-making one smidge.

[…] James Governor has every right to puff out his company’s chest following the results of the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations poll which saw his firm Redmonk take honours across a range of market slices. […]